Protestant 'blues'

Quite wonderful profile of John Updike in the Guardian. One passage describes my present universe to a T:

Americans, he says, are "trying to figure out how to be happy", but lately "it occurred to me that I have some of my father's depressive temperament. He used to sit in a chair and say, 'I've got the blues'. And I didn't know what the blues was. Why should he have the blues? It might be a tendency of Protestants in general. There's a kind of gloom, fear of death, fear of meaninglessness, and literary activity is one way of staving it off, isn't it? When you're writing something, you're relatively innocent. Time goes by so fast, I find, when I'm writing. It speeds by."